


spring / sun / winter / dread

by akhikosanada



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Foiled Confessions, Gen, Love Letters, M/M, Pining, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), all the relationships are implied but let's face it it's me of COURSE it's sylvix, basically my take on the story of sylvain's love letter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:33:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28489122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada
Summary: "His eyes sharpen on the words, on the soul-baring sentences curving along in thoughtful cursive, on the one scribbled at the top.Dear—Sylvain cannot make out the name that comes after; it is muddled and tear-stained, a blotch of ink scratched and rewritten and stricken over and over again, but the shape has carved itself into the wood underneath. When Sylvain runs a curious finger over it, he can feel its outline like a stamp, can understand the remnants of it like it’s his own.It is, thankfully, not his own. He doesn’t know why this makes his heart heavier inside his chest."Crumpled love letter: A carelessly discarded love letter. It probably belongs to someone with a complicated love life. Written for Lost & Found: a FE3H zine.
Relationships: (maybe one-sided for one or the other or for both who knows), Annette Fantine Dominic & Sylvain Jose Gautier, Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 17
Kudos: 92





	spring / sun / winter / dread

**Author's Note:**

> I am so incredibly thankful and happy to have been able to host Lost & Found: a FE3H zine! This project truly was Cherry and I's passion project, and I'm so proud to have reunited such awesome contributors to make this amazing zine about FE3H's lost items!
> 
> If you still haven't grabbed the zine, a leftover sale will soon be held where you'll be able to grab the PDF - all profits are going to the Lebanese Red Cross! Follow our Twitter account @lostfoundzine for more details :) 
> 
> i like to imagine this piece taking place in the same fragment and at more or less the same time than unforecasted storm, my other Annette & Sylvain piece - but there's absolutely no need to read one to understand the other.  
> Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy it!

The setting sun sprouts in scarlet stalks through the curtains of Annette’s room, sheds the last of its petals onto the sprawling mess of her desk and the distinct curl of used-up paper.

“Good,” Sylvain says from her desk chair as she switches her stance in the middle of the room, her feet grazing the carpet in a graceful crescent. The light sets her hair on candlefire. “Now lift your arms a little higher, and—”

“Excalibur!” Annette yells, and promptly sends flying every single book and class note spread out around them. “Oh no.” She gasps the word in a sigh of despair, the desk now clean of everything but the tome Sylvain’s elbow was propped on and the few sheets of paper it was holding down, and Sylvain can’t help the burst of laughter that escapes his chest at the sight of her disheveled hair and her horrified expression. A random strip of colored parchment folded in the shape of a star has lodged itself into Annette’s hair. “Don’t.”

The warning is lost on Sylvain, who lets his laughter drift on the wrong side of raucous. He entertains a thought, deep enough to border on subconsciousness, one that tries and fails to remember the last time he’s laughed this hard, this true.

He wipes a dramatic, non-existent tear from his eye. “Next time, maybe try and do it in the opposite direction, yeah?”

Annette huffs, her pigtails bouncing as she drops to the floor to reorganize the loose paper and close the hardcover books, and Sylvain wouldn’t be the true gentleman he pretends to be if he did not follow, right?

“You don’t have to help,” she tells him as he starts gathering up a pile of books to place onto her desk. “It’s my fault it all got messy.”

_It was messy to begin with_ , Sylvain almost answers, but chastises his own mind into quieting his tongue, and settles for a simple: “I’ve got it. I’m the one who keeps asking for these study sessions, so it’s partially my fault.”

Fortunately, Annette knows a losing battle when she sees one, and graciously gives out her thanks through a rosy, embarrassed blush. She starts humming, a few minutes in, an unconscious habit that worms its way through Sylvain’s heart in brotherly affection and through Sylvain’s fingers as he taps them along the imagined rhythm of her made-up melody. Her hands are so small, over the stack of paper she hands him. It’s hard to believe she was swinging an axe right through a bandit’s skull last week. He wonders if the songs she sings to herself have a different purpose, a distraction from the anxiety he often sees shivering over her shoulders, a method to her hard-preserved innocence.

His own hands move methodically as they organize the different tomes, dictionaries, and history books on the edge of her desk, straighten the piles of class notes with pretend-control. He lifts the volume he’d rested his arm on earlier to its rightful, papery place, his fingers reaching for the sheets underneath—

His eyes sharpen on the words, on the soul-baring sentences curving along in thoughtful cursive, on the one scribbled at the top. _Dear_ —

Sylvain cannot make out the name that comes after; it is muddled and tear-stained, a blotch of ink scratched and rewritten and stricken over and over again, but the shape has carved itself into the wood underneath. When Sylvain runs a curious finger over it, he can feel its outline like a stamp, can understand the remnants of it like it’s his own.

It is, thankfully, not his own. He doesn’t know why this makes his heart heavier inside his chest.

“I can’t believe little Annie has grown old enough to write love letters of her own,” he says as he turns, letter in hand, a practiced, teasing smile waxed on over his face.

“Give that back!” She shrieks as she tears the paper out from his grasp. “Goddess, this is _so_ embarrassing. Don’t tell me you’ve read it.”

“Will you believe me if I said I didn’t?”

Her eyes throw silent daggers through his whole frame. “No.”

Sylvain laughs, a light melody crackling into pretense. “Okay, okay. Yeah, I read it. It’s cute! I’m sure they’ll love it.”

The blush that flushes her face rivals the shade of her hair. “What do you mean, _cute_?! It’s not— oh Saints, it’s not good, is it? It’s bad, right? How did I even think this would work—”

Annette stumbles into a flurry of too-earnest self-critiques, rereads the prose out loud and tears into it like she tears into enemy factions on the battlefield, precise and earnest and so, so lost; and Sylvain already knows it is a bad idea, already knows the ending to the tale, but still sentences himself with a sentence, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Maybe I can help?”

***

Their studying routine develops into a different kind of ritual, one where Annette trades magic spells for words of love, one where Sylvain summons the ghost of what his own feelings would be, if he were to experience them. He wonders how efficient he is at perfecting her letter alongside her: Sylvain’s own knowledge of love is also absorbed from parchment ink, a chimera transmuted from the dozens of letters he’s himself received over his teenage years, a fairy tale creature he recalls best through a dictionary definition and the way others dress it up as, rather than the exact thing it’s supposed to be. Sylvain measures love in the weight of flower bouquets and shed clothing, in the number of sidelong gazes he catches clinging onto his frame and cups of tasteful tea drunk on tasteless dates, in the tokens of his mother’s indifference and his father’s disappointment and his brother’s hatred.

Annette knows this — probably — yet trusts him just the same. Whether it’s because he knows how to wield words as sharply as his own lance, or because he knows who the letter is intended for, or both, he willfully chooses to ignore.

Sometimes, Annette prompts him into trading adjectives like blows, from the flourished and ornate to the direct and true, a witty game of back-and-forth he enjoys almost as much as playing chess with Claude, mostly because this one is a game he always wins without even trying. He’s thought about these descriptions and qualifiers ever since he came to Garreg Mach, placing them on one side of the balance scale of his mind to weigh against the words his younger self used to write in his journals, back before his father had found them and made Sylvain burn them under his own hand. Those memories had flooded him, when he’d stepped into the Blue Lions classroom, a rush of water released from his family’s obstructing hand; he’d tamed them into a gentle flow, a small pond of childish delusions, better-off frozen and forgotten.

The best words, the truest definitions, come to him in dreams.

A gentle spring breeze carding fingers through his hair; a sunlight-soaked room and an unmade bed; gemstone eyes and wintry skin; careful confessions, whispered in the cold spaces between hands; the dread of a fate-sealing kiss, of a held, shared breath, of a beating heart that could break and stop and die.

The first few mornings, Sylvain wonders if the dreams are a byproduct of helping Annie — cute, earnest Annie, who takes his advice in a lot more topics than love letters, who studies Sylvain’s flirtations with the same diligence with which she studies Reason and Flying classes, who tries to catch attention just like she tries to catch Sylvain’s fire spells to throw them back at him. She illuminates each room she enters, a parhelion of renewed joy even as the days grow colder and more dire with each mission Lady Rhea sends them on; she requests Dedue’s help in the greenhouse to drop flowers on each and every doorstep, to better conceal who the flowers are truly destined to; she sings her way through life and chores, except when she shares one with the object of her infatuation, too timid or too ashamed to try and confess.

A month later, even Sylvain cannot lie to himself enough to pretend it’s just a passing fancy, to deny he’s somehow fallen for the same person Annette has fallen for. The revelation is slow and terrifying, a deep, long crack on an ice-covered lake.

“Maybe you should try and ask directly,” Sylvain tells her one day over tea. They're sharing the sweets Annette baked in the morning before she lost her nerve to actually go through with inviting her crush on a date, and there’s a buried, ocean-deep part of Sylvain who revels at that fact. “At the ball, for example. There’s never a more perfect occasion — asking for a dance, stepping in close, swooping down for the kill—”

“I— I just can’t do that! I’m not going to show the entire school my dance moves! I’m going to make a wrong step, and I’ll fall on my face, and everyone within miles of Garreg Mach is going to hear about silly Annette falling on her face at the White Heron Ball and laugh at me for decades.”

Sylvain hums. “What about a song? You’re good at these, and you have a lovely voice.” It’s merely the truth, and not another flirtatious line. Everyone loves Annette’s songs, even Felix — most of all Felix. He elects not to tell her.

“I tried to write one,” she says in a sigh that blows the scent of bergamot over Sylvain’s hands. “But it’s bad. Like, really bad. And I stutter too much anyway. Really, Sylvain, I truly think the letter is a way better idea.”

So he continues to perfect the letter with her, during their biweekly study session.

He also perfects the letter alone, in the dark of his own room, lying down on his mattress in the sickly glow of the Lance of Ruin.

The words take the dreamt-up shape of unearthed emotions, of the knowledge he’d left behind in the Gautier winters that has somehow made its way back to him. He begins his own letters like Annette does, with a _Dear_ and a flourish of hand to curve the name down into thin air. He begins writing verses and prose, scratches the sentences down in the confines of his mind, scratches the introduction out with it, too. He trades the _dear_ for _dearest_ , for _my dearest_ , ponders on adding a comma right afterwards for emphasis. He changes it up to an address, uses _To_ as a demarcation, as a proof he’s no longer writing in Annette’s stead. He writes and writes and writes, until his love falls and falls and falls, in the limitless expanse of his fantasies.

***

One night, it’s Annette who comes to him, as he’s busy reciting to himself the contents of his latest, imagined letter.

“It’s finished,” she says, and the dread in his heart flares in time with the brilliant fire of the triumph in her eyes.

He smiles, practice-perfect, all white teeth and no joy. “Show me?”

It’s flawless. Sylvain thumbs the edges of the letter as he reads the contents, the exact declaration it should be, ripe with all the advice Sylvain has given her, with all the innate knowledge Sylvain has gifted her.

He doesn’t find it in him to lie to her, not as she looks at him with these serious, winter-sky eyes, clouded with apprehension. “It’s perfect. No one would turn such a letter down.”

“Not even you?” Annette says with a teasing smile, one she’s also somehow learnt from him, he’s sure.

“Not even me.” He ruffles her hair with his hand. “But I’m a bad example. I never turn anyone down.”

“Have you ever fallen in love with anyone?”

Sylvain thinks of gemstone eyes and wintry skin, thinks of the shape of rare, secret smiles he’s tucked away for selfish safekeeping, thinks of the letter in his hands, so fragile and true, of words of love in a child’s journal, and how his father had taught him the exact temperature at which paper burns.

“No,” he lies, and if Annette sees through him, she doesn’t push it.

His night is sleepless and sorrowful, spent carving dread and desperation and deadly devotion into paper and the desk underneath, spent drying his throat of every description he’s ever wanted to say and of every sentence he’s never had the courage to write. He thinks of Annette’s disappointment, if he were to steal her thunder for himself — thinks about how he could probably sway her with a couple of well-worded pleas, how he could convince her not to go through with it, how easy it would be, to infuse in her the belief that she’s never been in love in the first place.

He thinks of how hard it would be, to convince himself that he deserves anyone’s love after that.

The sun rises as he lies down his pen, fingers bleeding ink. The paper curls under the downpour of his feelings, the first sentence chiseled onyx over ivory in all its simple, devastating truth.

_To my dearest, distant, desired: Despite what you may think, even as I kissed others, I never once kissed anyone but you._

***

“I can’t do it,” Annette says at the start of their next letter-writing rendez-vous, her legs crossed as she sits on Sylvain’s bed, snow eyes thawed down to tears. He wraps his arm around her shoulder, calms her tremors with the press of his side against hers, shushes words of reassurance into her hair.

“Sylvain.” She turns her gaze to him, hope-filled, her hand cautiously tight around the edge of the folded letter. “Would you deliver it for me?”

If Sylvain were Dimitri, he’d have politely refused. If Sylvain were Dedue, he’d have handed back the letter with firm encouragement. If Sylvain were Mercedes, he’d have pushed her to do it herself, a gentle smile on his face.

For all the pretenses he’s ever upholded, Sylvain has never once pretended to be a good person.

Annette leaves his room satisfied, a cheer in her step as she makes for Lysithea’s quarters to study; before he sets off, Sylvain walks to his desk, his own letter folded in much the same way as the one in his hands. He takes it too, just in case, counterbalances the two of them between his fingers. One is slightly heavier than the other, he notices as the sun warms his back outside, shines over the letter he chooses to pocket and the one that remains in his grasp the rest of the way, behind his back, his feet guiding him to the right place out of habit, as though finding his way home.

“Sylvain,” a voice calls out, irritated and fond, and Sylvain’s hand crumples the letter in the shape of his smile.

**Author's Note:**

> whose letter do you think he's crumpled lmao please comment if you're like me and you like Pain


End file.
